Powerful tools to monitor the health of the planet
High-definition satellite imaging allows greater certainty about changing climate on a daily basis
About five decades ago when researchers first began the scientific study of climate and the human impact on it, the tools at their disposal were relatively crude.
As a result, early research was imprecise and comprised largely of theoretical conjecture. By the1990s, computer models and historical observations allowed a consensus to develop that indeed human activity was causing dramatic changes in the climate.
But still the data was imprecise, open to interpretation – and there were many different interpretations.
Since then, thanks to major advances in two related fields – digital imaging and satellite technology – the tools available to more accurately measure changes on a daily basis have led to a remarkable transformation in the field.
Today it is possible to get much more precise data about both the causes and effects of climate change than ever before. It is no longer subject to such wide interpretation. It is more conclusive than it’s ever been.
Two examples – one private, the other run by the government – illustrate this in no uncertain terms.
The private company Planet Labs has the capability to provide images of the entire landmass of the Earth from space at a resolution so high it can detect when you cut down a tree in your front yard. One could say it has the capability to observe the causes of climate change as they occur.
Meanwhile, NASA provides daily updates on all sorts of climate phenomena from satellites in its Worldview project, which has a daily record going back two decades. This could be seen as monitoring the consequences of a changing climate as they happens.
Much of the guesswork has been replaced by recorded observations that give far greater certainty to scientific conclusions than was ever possible before.
Details of the climate data collected and made available by Planet Labs can be found and its web site Daily Earth Data to See Change and Make Better Decisions
Here we learn that “Planet provides daily satellite data that helps businesses, governments, researchers, and journalists understand the physical world and take action.”
In a video describing the company history, goals and capabilities we are told how Planet began a decade ago in Silicon Valley.
“We've always had the goal of empowering humanity with imagery of the planet taken on a more frequent basis,” says Will Marshall, co-founder and CEO of Planet Labs Inc.
“To achieve that we have to act differently. ‘Agile Aerospace’ as we called it, meant doing away with bulky billion-dollar satellites with drawn-out launch cycles. Instead we would design and build our own.”
Which is what they set out to do – and keep doing on a continuing basis. The company built and later refined tiny, inexpensive earth imaging devices capable of delivering data on demand.
“Now we are at the point where we can image the entire Earth every single day -– and it is a new capability that humanity has never had before,” the company says.
Want to know how many new buildings were started in your neighborhood? Planet can tell you. How much farmland was transformed into housing in the past year? You’re in the right place.
“Our constellation of nearly 200 Earth observation satellites currently orbiting Earth is the largest ever and we have amassed a 10 year archive of proprietary data that grows by 15 terabytes every day, creating a search engine for the planet.”
It is a remarkable but believable claim. “Google indexed what's on the Internet and made it searchable. We're indexing what's on the Earth and making it searchable,” the video explains.
The company has spent a decade building out the dataset that uses machine learning to make it easy to consume.
Now, it allows users to combine information and data to deliver many different capabilities to its customers.
“Businesses today operate faster than ever before. Last month’s data is no longer sufficient. Last week’s data is no longer sufficient. You need today’s data,” says Kevin Weil, president of product and business.
One of the surprising testimonies in the video is provided by billionaire Michael R. Bloomberg (who made his fortune compiling huge datasets for business applications), speaking at a Planet user conference:
“This is just going to get better and more ubiquitous all the time, and there is a market for it. And Planet is a company that is really at the forefront of all of this,” Bloomberg says.
Planet says its subscription-based business model is unique for the industry, allowing the company to serve data to multiple users across a variety of industries.
“Historically the way the industry worked you had very big, very expensive satellites that only the wealthiest of countries and companies could afford to task and get an image of what might be transpiring at any point in time in a specific place,” says Ashley Johnson, chief operating officer.
“Planet is different because we have taken the approach that we want to create a dataset that can apply to any company in any industry of any size,” Johnson, says.
CEO Marshall adds another insight: “We operate at very high margin because we are already capturing the entire Earth every single day. The cost of serving each new customer is very low,” he. says
As a result, the data is used across a wide number of applications. Farmers seeking higher crop yields, governments needing visibility into urban developments (“How many office buildings broke ground in Shanghai last month”) and for businesses that simply need mission-critical insights – all can use it for their specific needs.
Also appearing in the video is Sella Nevo of Google: “We rely on Planet’s SkySat imagery to produce elevation maps that will let us know how floods are going to move across the flood plain,” she says, “so we know who is in danger and where they can go to be safe.”
Also featured is Dr. Hannah Kerner of NASA Harvest a food security and agriculture program coordinated by the University of Maryland.
“Planet data is really revolutionary to our industry,” Kerner says. “Never before have we been able to get this daily imagery everywhere on the globe not only in the major food producing countries, where we might have capacity for Earth observation already, but we have it everywhere.”
The Earth is changing more quickly than ever and in ways that are dramatically disrupting economies, society and the environment.
“Planet’s opportunity is massive,” CEO Marshall says. “We sit at the center of two of the most important multi-trillion dollar trends in the world today: digital transformation and sustainability. They affect every company in every industry and every government around the world.”
But Planet is not the only organization to have eyes in the sky providing huge reams of data on a changing planet.
Separately, NASA has another enormously powerful tool that provides unparalleled data on daily weather and climate-related events all of over the globe – from floods, to fires to agriculture and even deforestation.
NASA Worldview allows users to “visually explore the past and the present of this dynamic planet from a satellite's perspective,” says NASA on its website.
“Select from an array of stories … to learn more about Worldview, the satellite imagery we provide and events occurring around the world.”
One of those “stories” is about fires around the globe and it is up to date as of mid-November in “Satellite Detections of Fire (2021 update)”
“NASA provides insights into fires and thermal anomalies occurring daily around the world. Satellite-derived fire data and imagery available in Worldview are from instruments aboard three satellites…”
Data collected by the satellites records the emission of mid-infrared radiation from fires and thermal anomalies (like volcano eruptions) and are shown as orange or red points on a global map.
You can go back to August, the height of the fire season in the northern hemisphere, and see just how much orange and red dominates the map of North America at that point in time … and daily since then.
“The Worldview tool … provides the capability to interactively browse over 1000 global, full-resolution satellite imagery layers and then download the underlying data,” NASA says.
Many of the layers are updated daily and are available within three hours of observation – essentially showing the entire Earth as it looks “right now.”
Among the time-critical applications it can support – where time is a crucial variable – are wildfire management, air quality measurements, and flood monitoring.
One can view current natural hazards using the Events tab which reveals a list of natural events such as wildfires, tropical storms, and volcanic eruptions.
Because it has satellite records going back two decades, you can even animate the imagery over time.
Before you take a test drive of the super sophisticated Worldview program, there is a useful tutorial that introduces users to some of the features that might not be obvious to a casual visitor.
“This tool provides the capability to interactively browse over 900 global, full resolution satellite imagery layers. Many of these layers are updated daily and are available within three hours of observation,” the tutorial says. It is an enormous database.
“These full disk hemispheric views (half the earth is visible in each) allow for almost real time viewing of changes occurring around most of the world, essentially showing the entire earth as it looks right now.
“The easy to use map interface lets you interactively explore NASA Earth Signs imagery to see hurricanes forming, wildfire spreading, icebergs drifting and city lights illuminating.”
A good example is provided in a tour the bushfires in Australia from September 2019 to January 2020 – the worst in that country’s recent history. Utilizing various steps, you can see different satellite data imagery layers to view the fires in great detail.
Many different ways to view the data
It’s a bit like going down a rabbit hole: there are so many different ways to explore the data – that’s the 900 layers – that you could spend days doing so and not reach the end.
Both of these tools – Planet Labs and NASA Worldview – offer unprecedented ways to map and analyze what is happening on a daily basis to the planet we all call home.
They allow not only monitoring, but analysis of how weather systems form and develop, what are the consequences of human action (like converting forest to agricultural land, or building megacities on coastal plains) and how the two interact.
They provide insights we have never had before. Let’s hope they are put to good use by the people who know best how to use them, because they could prove essential to saving the only planet we have.
Fascinating article Warren - boggles the mind!
Wonder if it could be used to, say, immediately cover an ongoing robbery or other criminal activity. Maybe it doesn't work that way, but it will be fun to explore its capabilities. A little creepy in terms of what can be out there that can monitor our activities. Welcome Big Brother, even though it seems to be a great tool that will help monitor climate changes.